IJusi Portfolio #1

iJusi portfolio no.1 T +27 (0)72 6580 762 C +27 (0)83 6894 461 us@rookeandvanwyk.com www.rookeandvanwyk.com

iJusi portfolio no.1

Towards a new visual culture.

IJusi is an experimental publication, founded, edited, and curated by Garth Walker, aiming to piece together the various cultural dichotomies that are currently dominating South African art, craft, and design. IJusi is an inquiry into what it means to be ‘African’, and what does ‘African’ look like; an endeavor to solve the ‘identity crisis’ that forms an important part of South Africa’s ongoing social and cultural dialogue.

IJusi is a cultural statement, made from various contributions by key South African artists and designers, extended over multiple magazine issues, announcing that the artistic, creative and cultural revolution is not yet over, even

though the Political Revoltion has been won. In this way, iJusi is an important series of documents; testaments to a still-developing country dealing with various socio-economic and historico-political issues.

Despite the percieved issues that South Africa has, iJusi is not a negative, or even critical commentary on South Africa.

Rather, iJusi is a platform from whence to discover the wealth of talent, rich traditions, and strong sense of heritage in South Africa, with its diverse cultural backgrounds, each with their own contribution to make, exposing a creative poignancy and visual vocabulary that remains unrivaled to this day.

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Garth Walker 2

Garth Walker is a pioneering South African graphic designer from Durban, known for his groundbreaking work as the founder of two canonical studios in South Africa. Orange Juice Design was Walker’s first studio, established in the mid-1990s, where he conceived of and published iJusi magazine.

Widely regarded as a forerunner in Post-Apartheid graphic design, Walker is a true custodian. His continuing efforts to map and situate the specifics of various South African design heritages has contributed to the emergence of a rooted, culturally relevant design community that has developed gradually of the past two decades.

After selling Orange Juice Design to Ogilvy South Africa in 2003, Walker opened his second studio called Mister Walker in 2008, where he continues to publish iJusi as an independent, noncommercial, experimental design magazine, which is fast becoming a concise visual reference on the South African vernacular in design.

From this foundation Walker has become an institution, practically in a league of his own.

His support of cultural rootedness in South Africa extends further into his considerable archive of South African rural, street and township photography, which is the largest known collection of its kind in the world, ranging from gravestones to street signage.

From this foundation, Walker has managed to turn himself into a global authority on the subject of South African design. His work is as subversive as it is classical, turning

design into a social responsibility, emphasizing a pastiche of global influences and the hybridization of local cultures. He entices reinterpretations of traditional elements, attempting to retrieve fragments of diversity without forcing a reversal of identity, gradually clarifying the murkiness of post-colonial, post-Apartheid, contemporary South Africa.

Walker has disseminated his ideas across the globe, propagating notions of African creativity at conferences and workshops on all five continents. In this way, Walker is a pivotal exponent, crafting a route towards diverse cultural foundations that has already contributed so much towards the maturation of a continually developing South Afrcan design identity.

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Conrad Botes 4

Conrad Botes is a co-founder of Bitterkomix, and has been instrumental in the creation of a new, relevant Afrikaner design heritage in South Africa. Challenging older stereotypes and prejudices on the subject, Botes along with his Bitterkomix collaborators, Mark and Anton Kannermeyer, have redefined a place for Afrikanerdom, breaking away from popular understandings about Afrikaans culture that are commonly linked to Apartheid.

Botes does so by focusing on the polarities related to identity in South Africa, specifically relating to the constructed and oftenfraudulent subjectivities that have plagued South Africa since the Apartheid era. By toying with the notion of the politically incorrect, Botes deals with subject matter that is specifically aimed at a South African audience, and designed to provoke any harbingers of bigotry, which has caused some to coin the phrase ‘Boere-Punk’.

Botes’ work is an erosion of the stagnant conventions and

values that fuel the varying stigmas within South Africa, debunking the dated subjectivities of many South Afircans still living within a misguided ‘golen-age’ sense of nostalgia. Thus, Botes topples obsolete understandings of personhood and nationhood, attacking the system from the inside-out.

His characteristic hybridization of erotica and nostalgia, alongside his use of parody and satire sets his work aside. He does so in order to communicate biting messages that expose a corrupt and diseased idealogical structure.

Botes’ contributions to iJusi and Bitterkomix have helped establish both publications as institutions in South Africa, characterising him as an advocate of the Post-Pop movement in South Africa.

In recent years, Botes has ventured into painting, and is currently represented by Stevenson in Cape Town. His paintings tend to be more personal than his drawings and illustrations, and therefore more accessible, which has caused

his work to be noticed on the international market. His painted works are self-referential and selfcritical, still creating the same sense of alienation and disjuncture evident in his more politically orientated prints and illustrations. His work can be described as a ‘comic noir’ of sorts, emphasizing the hidden evils of the humanist metanarrative, making his work in some way an inquiry into Posthumanism, combatting passé notions of white, middleclass, Afrikanerdom.

Botes’ work is represented in local and international collections including the Sanlam Collection (Johannesburg), Johannesburg Art Gallery, and The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA, New York).

He has exhibited locally and abroad, notably winning a Vita-Art award in 2004, and representing South Africa at the Havanna Biennale in 2006. In 2008, alongside Nicholas Hlobo and Penny Siopis, Botes represented South Africa at the Third Guangzhou Triennial in China. And, in 2009 he was the festival artist at The Aardklop National Arts Festival in Potchefstroom.

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Anton Kannemeyer 6

Anton Kannemeyer is an established artist and illustrator from Cape Town. He graduated Cum Laude with a Masters degree in Fine Art from the University of Stellenbosch. After his studies he took a junior lecturing position at the University of Pretoria, and later Witwatersrand Technikon (University of Johannesburg), eventually moving back to the Western Cape lecturing in a senior position at Stellenbosch University.

In 2006 Kannemeyer left academics to become a full-time artist.

Kannemeyer is a founding member of Bitterkomix, and has featured consistantly in iJusi, making him a major contributor to the South African vernacular. Kannemeyer’s comic-style illustrations stem from his background growing-up in the white, middle class suburbia of Transvaal during the Apartheid

era. Hailing back to classic Tin Tin comics, his work is a typical parody of the times, playing with the language of satire in his own idiosynchratic, peculiar way.

Kannemeyer often works under the pseudonym Joe Dog, meaning ‘You Dog’ in Afrikaans. Aided and abetted by his Bitterkomix co-collaborator Conrad Botes, Kannemeyer has displayed a Duchampian ability to manipulate the medium of comics by provoking controversy, critiquing the Afrikaner cultural mainstream, often doing so in Afrikaans.

His prolific output has caused many to place him under the banner of ‘Boere-Punk’.

The socio-historical deconstruction of Afrikaner language and culture sets the tone for Kannemeyer’s work, evident in his Alphabet

of Democracy series. His visual grammar is characterised by an obsession with, and mastery over hand-drawn typography, lettering and colloquial illustration. He takes advantage of local perceptions and definitions relating to current versus the past status-quo’s, and utilises intertextual devices that extend into widespread prejudices and social injustices that preoccupy South Africans to this day.

Kannemeyer has participated in numerous group exhibitions, most of them international.

He has had a number of solo shows, notably at The Jack Shainman Gallery in New York, Art on Paper in Johannesburg, and at Stevenson in Cape Town.

He has also curated several comic exhibitions in South Africa and Europe.

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Brode Vosloo 8

Brode Vosloo studied graphic design at Technikon Natal (currently Durban University of Technology). After completing his diploma in 1996 Vosloo was recruited by Garth Walker to join Orange Juice Design, where he was the leading type designer.

His experience in Typography has lead him to develop a number of African inspired digital fonts, notably Shoe Repairs licensed to the online type foundry T.26.

Since 2008, Vosloo has been the European Marketing Manager for the Fox sports brand.

He designs for iJusi when time permits, with his latest contribution being in the Afrika Tyografika III (iJusi #26). His

approach to design exhibits a typically South African design aesthetic, being brash and selfassertive. As Vosloo says: “I like pretty things, I like to make ‘em pretty. I find beauty in the ugly, but sometimes I see ugliness in the beautiful. I’m a lover, I’m a fighter. I am a designer, I’m a marketer. I live to surf.

I surf to live. When all else fails... I create”.

Vosloo is recognized by the D&AD, and has been awarded numerous Certificates of Merit

by Art Directors Club. He has won multiple Loerie Awards, including one Grand Prix, two Gold and one Silver.

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Mark Kannemeyer 10

Mark Kannemeyer is a co-founder of Bitterkomix, alongside his brother Anton Kannemeyer and co-collaborator Conrad Botes.

Aside from his Bitterkomix fame, Kannemeyer is an accomplished draftsman and painter, holding a Masters degree (Cum Laude) in Fine Arts from the University of Arts in Berlin, Germany. During his seven year stay in Germany Kannemeyer mastered the art of painting, producing a body of largescale abstract paintings noted for its generative and gestural painting style.

Kannemeyer’s paintings display a level of artistic skill that has seldom been achieved by other contemporary painters. Such was his conviction for his craft that the challenges he tookon drove him to stop painting altogether. His paintings are extremely rare as a result.

Kannemeyer is currently represented by Art on Paper in Johannesburg, where he is recognized for his prints and drawings under the moniker of Lorcan White. Kannemeyer’s drawings are less graphic than the work of his Bitterkomix collaborators, yet they possess greater expressive qualities, still dealing with specific subjects that have strong references to Afrikaans culture.

Kannemeyer’s illustrations are made up of constructed, organic spaces that bridge the gap between gesture and concept. His compositions are structural and organic, communicating forces of conflict and coercion. He consistently positions natural and unnatural forms in opposition to each other, where handcrafted and machine-made elements collide,

and it is this idiosyncratic clash between drawn elements that gives Kannemeyer an iconoclastic relevancy within contemporary drawing practices globally.

Through Bitterkomix and iJusi, Kannemeyer’s unorthodox, antiestablishment approach is on par with the current Afrikaans PostPop scene, cementing his place within the South African vernacular of art and design.

Kannemeyer is also the driving-force behind a publication called Zombie, which is a comic series that he produced in collaboration with his students at the Open Window School of Visual Communication in Pretoria.

Zombie is an unashamedly disrespectful, cuttingly brash publication aiming to jolt the confines of establishment.

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Brandt Botes 12

Brandt Botes started his career as a Graphic Designer in Cape Town, and holds a Degree in the Fine Arts from Stellenbosch University. His background in the Fine Arts gave him a strong understanding of conceptual art practices, which resultantly allowed him to craft his own special brand of illustration and graphic design.

Botes’ first position was at Orange Juice Design in Durban, later moving to Lowe Bull in Cape Town, finally getting a position as Head of Design at The Jupiter Drawing Room. After more than a decade of agency work, Botes founded his own studioboutique in Cape Town, called Studio Botes, which specialises in corporate identity, packaging design and illustration. Botes is

recognized for his indiosyncratic style of humor and satire, allowing his work to fit well within the ever-growing vernacular of iJusi.

Botes’ accolades include numerous Loerie awards (SA), D&AD awards (UK), and Cannes awards (FR). Botes is also recognized by the Art Directors Club, Type Directors Club, and British Design and Art Directors Club.

Notably, in 2007 Botes was the first South African to win a Gold Pencil at The One Show. He has exhibited his work locally and abroad, with inclusions in most iJusi exhibitions. He has also contributed to group exhibitions at Whatiftheworld gallery, and the Toffie Pop Culture Festival in Cape Town.

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Wilhelm Kruger 14

Wilhelm Kruger completed a degree in Fine Arts at the University of Stellenbosch.

After completing his studies in 1998 he joined Garth Walker at Orange Juice Design in Durban, where he worked as a graphic designer. He is currently a Senior Digital Designer for the Chemistry Communications Group.

Kruger’s work focuses on the relationship between design and culture, and the responsibility that designers have in the creation of a cultural identity outside the commercial sphere of marketing and advertising.

From Kruger’s perspective, South Africa is a young democracy with many social and moral challenges ahead, making it the perfect place for experimental tendencies, offering a diverse amount of subject matter for designers and artists alike to grapple with. It is

within this atmosphere that Kruger thrives, specifically relating to the manner in which designers are influenced by culture and identity outside the commercial arena. In this way, iJusi has offered him a platform to express and explore his own Afrikaner cultural identity in Post-Apartheid South Africa.

Kruger’s typographical designs, illustrations and photographs are monuments to his understanding of South Africa’s cultural landscape. He situates himself within the realm of the politically incorrect, placing his work well within the context of iJusi, helping to forge a South African design language through experimentation and hybridization.

Kruger’s work is a blend of his Afrikaner heritage, which is strongly linked to stereotypes of Apartheid, and new, critical interpretations of contemporary South Africa.

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Pieter Hugo 16

Pieter Hugo (b.1976, Johannesburg, Gauteng) is a Cape Town based photographer documenting the innate eccentricities of various rituals, backgrounds, customs and conventions in contemporary Africa. From bourgeois lifestyles in Ghana and Liberia, to extreme pop-culture versus underground sub-culture in Nigeria, to the tragic tedium of suburban South Africa, Hugo portrays the affect of Western culture, specifically regarding constructs of ‘otherness’ and ‘outsider’ politics. His images portray inherited obsolesces, polemic handme-downs, and ad-hoc influences from the West, and the residuum of corporate interests, exposing Africa as a complex yet abused and corrupted resource.

Following the tradition of documentary photography, Hugo hinges his approach upon the periphery, the fringe, and the marginalized. Even with the richness and vastness of Africa and its many cultures, built upon fractured negotiations, nuances of difference, and contested geographies, the continent still sits with the pit of colonialism sinking deep into its socio-economic core.

Within this murky, often corrupt

space there is a high probability of finding strange hybrids and cultural chimera’s. South Africa is at the forefront of this schizophrenic cultural paradigm, where heritage, tradition, and fraternity all permeate to reinforce mutations of age-old colonial issues.

In this vein, the first series that established Hugo as an internationally recognized artist is Look Aside. Created between 2003-2006, this series focuses on superficial prejudices that play a pivotal role in the fabrication of the status quo; documenting people who have appearances that make other people ‘look aside’. He brings to the fore our preconceptions, making us question our own unfounded perceptions about otherness and difference.

These portraits include people with disfigurement, blindness, and albinos, meant to be unsettling, uncompromisingly extracting an awareness of apathy and pathos.

These images imbue a sense of disbelief and repulsion, urging one to encounter difference upfront using dramatic frontal portraits, exposing the artifice of the status quo. Hugo decinstructs what constitutes the norm, specifically

reflecting upon the invented realities of race, class, and the like.

Other important series’ include The Hyena & Other Men (2005), Nollywood (2008), Permanent Error (2010), where Hugo dissects the imitation of the West and infestation by the West in some form or other. He pairs strife with its counterpoint in opulence, power with its antithesis in fragility, forged in the remains of multiple, distinct cultural identities, all struggling to match the pace of a ubiquitous, hegemonic drive for progress and profit, largely to the detriment of the proletariat and the environment.

Kin (2013) is perhaps the subtlest series that Hugo has produced in this regard, with every image becoming a meditation in juxtaposition to the next image. Each image entices one to truly observe, curated in narrative clusters, not seeming to have any clear coherency, but somehow crafting a uniform story about the notion of ‘home’. Kin is about the slightof-hand situations in life, piecing together moments that sometimes bind us and other times divide us.

Consisting of varying, contrasting

scenes taken from different locations across South Africa, Kin oscillates from private to public with ease and sensitivity, revealing the gulf between the affluent and the impoverished in the aftermath of South Africa’s colonial past, with all the troubling socio-economic factors that have fallen into place as a result. As the name suggests, Kin is about family and how in a country fraught with violence and desolation, with an unhappy past and an uncertain future, can one maintain the sanctity of roots and bloodlines.

Hugo finds distinctiveness in the many altered and contested geographies that he has photographed across the continent.

His images create a relationship between portraiture and landscape, inseparable yet worlds apart, depicting a continent where the people and the land have an intrinsic bond, where the familiar and the unfamiliar cross-pollinate and the uncommon finds level ground with the commonplace.

He shows us the innate materialism of the occident in contrast to the resultant mutations that presently characterise Africa, making possible the impossible fusion of the civilized and the anarchic.

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Mikhael Subotzky 18

Mikhael Subotzky (b. 1981, Cape Town) is the only alumnus in the history of the prestigious Michaelis School of Fine Art to achieve a mark of one-hundred percent for his final year. He has since become a world-renowned artist, currently represented by the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg. He is the youngest photographer to become an associate member at Magnum Photos, and the first South African artist to have a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. He openly declares the influence of David Goldblatt, which is likely one of the most important photographic oeuvres to capture South Africa’s colonialist history, evidenced through his characteristic depiction of the landscape and its people.

Subotzky utilises the divide between the rural and the urban, emphasising the ambiguity that exists within social perceptions of inside and outside, accepted and rejected, enlightened and alienated, the diffuse and the concentrated. His investigations

are grounded by various culturally assumed socio-political norms and perceived ‘A priori givens’ within South Africa. He does so in the wake of Apartheid, but goes further to uproot the underlying opposition between oppression and emancipation, examining the somewhat bi-polar grasp that most South Africans have in their attempt to build a new identity in an often apathetic and infantile democracy; jaundiced and anchored by its unjust past marred by racial segregation and quasi-totalitarianism. In this way Subotzky reveals the historicoeconomic hierarchies and constructs of class, ethnicity and status that exist in PostColonial South Africa.

More specifically, he finds his niche and artistic voice in the context of localised power structures, such as notorious prisons, famous gangs, iconic architecture – all signifiers of authority and control, products of containment and repudiation.

His images document the broadly accepted politics of inhumanity,

degradation, prejudice, victimization and desperation to be found in many sectors of South African society, tracing the remnants of a recycled Apartheid infrastructure.

The prison is an overarching archetype in relation to the city and its structures, be it in the form of power, architecture, institutions, or narratives placed in contrast to the land and its supposed catharsis.

The prison is an analogy leading to the central point: the vast integration of typecast individuals - citizens, denizens, criminals into a dominant political system, segregated into castes, creeds and classes, adhering to a constructed system of discipline and punishment, which succeeds at the exploitation of human beings as opposed to liberating them: prison society.

To compliment his anthropological inquiry, Subotzky introduced dystopian elements of Orwellian fiction, coupled with the poststructuralist discourse of Foucault – all elements that inform the core of his work to this day.

Informed by the tradition of documentary photography, Subotsky’s work stresses mechanisms of control, power games, and territory wars governed by augmented structures and prosthetic institutions that stunt growth more than they develop and sustain; where the overall maturation of South Africa is quelled in favor of a select, elite few and their material interests, whilst the proletariat increasingly becomes indifferent; passive-aggressive.

His work displays South Africa’s tumult and disorder in developing an infrastructure that is able to consolidate the effects of Apartheid, failing to contain social degeneration, particularly regarding issues of class and status in a country plagued by endemic poverty, crime, and violence. An ode to Plato’s Cave, after the dust has settled, the cultural revolution is imprisoned in an ivory tower; this is absolutute freedom, total establishment, all in preparation for more dust to settle.

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David Goldblatt 20

David Goldblatt (b. 1930, Randfontein) is arguably an institution in South Africa. He has worked as a professional photographer since the early 1960s, and has developed a seminal oeuvre that can be understood as a critical dissection of South Africa’s society and landscape over five decades.

More specifically, Goldblatt has concisely documented the ghostly impact of Apartheid during its peak and in its wake. Known for his lucid brand of humanism, Goldblatt’s images make apparent the unerring vestiges of the South African socio-political landscape.

At the heart of Globlatt’s artistic enquiry is an inherent curiosity towards the manner in which values are constructed and marketed, tolerating the interpretation of a dominant moralism that still exists. His dissection of past metanarratives, including the affects and emulation of such power structures today, subtly yet critically unwraps the universal reasonings for Apartheid to have existed.

These values, acting as alibi’s to oppression and degradation, are still etched into the landscapes, personalities, and architectures of the present. Goldblatt captures this oscillation of power and history, tolerating a brief yet poetic insight into the context of people’s lives before and after Apartheid. His images are rooted in conflict and dissent, evoking palimpsest-like portraits of Apartheid, subtly enforcing an engagement with the consequences of our morals, truths, and norms. From this context he communicates how frivolous certain separations in society can be, specifically regarding issues of class, race, and status.

Goldblatt’s depictions of a stillfragmented, yet somehow cohering South African landscape have been widely dispersed and exhibited extensively abroad and locally, notably being the first South African to have a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York in 1998. Aside from his prolific career as a photographer,

Golblatt has been actively involved with community developments and cultural establishments. Most notably in 1989, as an attempt to introduce photography to disadvantaged communities and bridge the often-elitist artistic and cultural rift between rich and poor in South Africa, Goldblatt established the Market Photography Workshop in Newtown, Johannesburg. Over the years this school has contributed enormously to the development of South African photography, and South Africa’s position as a dominant player in the world. Amongst its alumni are some of South Africa’s greatest talents, including: Jodi Bieber, Zanele Muholi, Sabelo Mlangeni, Musa Nxumalo, and Nontsikelelo Veleko.

Goldblatt has exhibited at the acclaimed Documenta 11 (2002) and Documenta 12 (2007) exhibitions in Kassel, Germany. His Retrospective, David Goldblatt – Fifty-One Years, was exhibited worldwide, including a show at the Johannesburg Art

Gallery (2005). He is represented by the Goodman in Johannesburg and the Stevenson in Cape Town, with multiple solo exhibitions and publications from both galleries, including TJ: Some things old, some things new and some much the same (2010), In Boksburg (2009), and Intersections Intersected (2008).

Amongst his numerous accolades, Goldblatt is the recipient of the 2006 Hasselblad award, the 2009 Henri Cartier-Bresson Award, and the 2010 Lucie Award for Lifetime Achievement. He has received an Honorary Doctorate in Fine Arts from the University of Cape Town (2001), and an Honorary Doctorate of Literature from the University of the Witwatersrand (2008). He features in many collections across the globe including The Victoria and Albert Museum (London), The Biblioteque Nationale de France (Paris), The Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art, Museum of Modern Art (New York), and The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. 21

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Copy, layout and design by Shane de Lange. shane@gilgamesh.co.za | +27 (0)72 383 5091

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T +27 (0)72 6580 762 C +27 (0)83 6894 461 us@rookeandvanwyk.com www.rookeandvanwyk.com